Great post Walt. I don't know what party these neo-rebs belong to, but that was MY Republican party in your post.
Great post Walt. I don't know what party these neo-rebs belong to, but that was MY Republican party in your post.
Thanks.
It does make you wonder why these morons would belittle Abraham Lincoln, that is for sure.
Walt
"Whoever would understand in his heart the meaning of America will find it in the life of Abraham Lincoln...."
And I think of this:
"At home and abroad judgments came oftener that America had at last a President who was All-American. He embodied his country in that he had no precedents to guide his footsteps; he was not one more individual of a continuing tradition, with the dominant lines of the mold already cast for him by Chief Magistrates who had gone before. Webster, Calhoun, and Clay conformed to a classicism of the school of the English gentleman, as did perhaps all the Presidents between Washington and Lincoln, save only Andrew Jackson.
The inventive Yankee, the Western frontiersman and pioneer, the Kentuckian of laughter and dreams, had found blend in one man who was the national head. In the "dreamy vastness" noted by the London Spectator, in the pith of the folk words "The thoughts of the man are too big for his mouth," was the feel of something vague that ran deep in American hearts, that hovered close to a vision for which men would fight, struggle, and die, a grand though blurred chance that Lincoln might be leading them toward something greater than they could have believed might come true.
Also around Lincoln gathered some of the hope that a democracy can choose a man, set him up high with power and honor, and the very act does something to the man himself, raises up new gifts, modulations, controls, outlooks, wisdoms, inside the man, so that he is something else again than he was before they sifted him out and anointed him to take an oath and solemnly sign himself for the hard and terrible, eye-filling and center-staged, role of Head of the Nation.
To be alive for the work he must carry in his breast Cape Cod, the Shenandoah, the Mississippi, the Gulf, the Rocky Mountains, the Sacramento, the Great Plains, the Great Lakes, their dialects and shibboleths. He must be instinct with the regions of corn, textile mills, cotton, tobacco, gold, coal, zinc, iron."
--Abraham Lincoln, The War Years, Vol. II, pp.331-333, by Carl Sandburg
Walt